Technical Article

I'm a Developer at heart.

I've got many years of AppDev under my belt, a few years of Architecture, and a couple years of networking. That makes me a pretty well-rounded individual.

But our market confuses me. We (and here I mean all the Load Balancing/App Acceleration vendors) want to keep networking terminology, but hope to sell to Application Developers.

Ain't gonna work.

I have long been a proponent of "You can't be an application developer and not be aware of the network anymore". I told some students that in a C++ class I was teaching years ago, and it gets more true all of the time.

But your average enterprise developer is buried, just keeping up with standards, new releases of dev environments, new languages, and the internecine struggle over the One True Database, One True Language, One True OS, and One True Data Format.

No matter how way-bang cool your product is, developers aren't interested if it (and the sales staff) don't speak their language. They just don't have the time.

We at F5 are pretty lucky, I've seen some email go across from some bright individuals, and all of my limited interactions with our sales staff have told me that, for the most part, F5 gets it. Compared to the competition, it looks pretty good to me. But ignoring the competition, and looking at it from the developers' perspective, we still have a long way to go. That's cool, there is always room for improvement, and one thing is certain about this crowd, if it can be better, they'll work on it.

The iRule editor is an example of what I mean by that... The product worked well without it, but it was one of those things that added value for those developing iRules. If you don't already have it, you can read about it and download it here

While functionally the system didn't need an iRules editor, it was certainly high on the wish list of users, and they turned it out (before I came here, to be sure).

So I'm looking forward to a simplified, developer oriented interface that an Application Architect or an Application Developer can quickly and easily define how the BigIP should handle their application without becoming router jockeys. I think it would be cool.

This is a company blog site, so I'll tell you up-front to avoid confusion, I do not know of a plan to implement such a beast, I am not in a position to know of such a plan. I work for DevCentral, not Product Development.